My first plan was to write an article about my hometown Magdeburg for the Dutch Wikipedia. Living in this city for almost 19 years, means that I can call myself an expert on this subject. I recognized on the Dutch Wikipedia that there was an article missing about the art museum where my mother works. So I thought writing an article about this museum would be an easy job. But due to my imperfections of the Dutch language I decided wisely to contribute to the German Wikipedia instead. The result of this decision was an article about the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam. I didn’t write about this botanical garden because I am very interested in flowers. Not at all! I just wrote about it because it was one of the few missing article about Amsterdam in the German Wikipedia. And being a new ‘Amsterdammer’, I felt the duty to complete the subject and teach the German readers something about my favorite city. So I started researching about the Hortus Botanicus and luckily found some suitable information on the Hortus Botanicus website and on the Dutch Wikipedia. I wrote a short article and I was planning to take photos of the garden to add it to my article. To my surprise, someone did this one day later. People even started to improve the article day by day by changing the design and adding some facts. To be honest, I was really astonished and amazed how quickly people added things to ‘my’ article. Why astonished? Simply because of the huge amount of articles in the German Wikipedia. The German Wikipedia is the second biggest one with 1.129.725 articles (03-10-2010, 12:00:37) and this amount is still increasing. So in conclusion I can say that my first Wikipedia experience was without any problems and inspiring – inspiring for others to share their knowledge and inspiring for me to continue writing Wikipedia articles.
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